May/100
The shoemakers children could have had shoes, if only….
I wrote a blog post last week about dumb things that otherwise smart people do or say. The conclusion of the post was that there is always something to learn in order to improve, and it is foolish to think otherwise, or to avoid efforts for self-improvement because of this misconception.
To make the point, I invoked the spirit of Abraham Lincoln (sharpen your ax before trying to cut down the big tree) and Lance Armstrong (ride your strengths, train your weaknesses). I suggested that in your efforts to sharpen and train, there are plenty of books, blogs, podcasts, etc. to help you.
But what’s the problem?
Which ax should you sharpen? Which weakness should you train?
The advice is my last blog is good advice (if I may say so myself), but it presumes that a person knows what needs improvement. This is often not the case. What to do?
Let’s attack this like salespeople – PROFESSIONAL salespeople!
When I go to meet with a prospect, I don’t assume that I know what issues they might have. I don’t even assume that the prospect is aware of the issues they might have. I go into the meeting with the idea that IT IS MY JOB to help me and my prospect discover together what issues might exist that I might be able to help with.
In the vernacular of the sales process described in my book, Mastering Your Sales Process, I call this step “Needs Analysis”.
Have you heard of it? It is THE core element of a professional selling system. If we don’t know what our prospect needs to fix, how on earth can we offer a solution that has value to them?
Do you have some kind of a systematic needs analysis that you use with your prospects? (If not, shame on you!). How did you develop it? Could you develop a new needs analysis for a new kind of prospect if the opportunity to do so arose? What if you got a new job? What if your company started selling in a new market, or started selling a new kind of solution? You would have to develop a new needs analysis system in order to be successful. The ability to do so is an important part of being an effective salesperson in an ever changing world.
So what if the product was you?
See where we are going here?
If the goal is the improve, but the question is “improve what?”, then the answer is needs analysis. Do you know how to do one? If so, do a needs analysis on yourself as a salesperson, or a tennis player, or a spouse, or whatever area of your life that you want to improve. When you find your answer, go find books or podcasts or coaches that can help you.
If you can’t find the answer yourself, recruit the help of a friend, a co-worker, a manager, a life coach, or a spiritual adviser (for those of you in my adopted home state of California).
If after all of this you can’t come up with an answer, then allow me to suggest that your first skill to improve is the skill of developing and conducting a needs analysis on ANY kind of problem that comes along. It will make you a better salesperson, and will give you an important tool with which to improve all of the areas of your life that are worthy of an investment of energy towards the return of self improvement.
Then you can do the needs analysis on yourself, and go after all of the rest of the stuff!
Mar/102
Where is the spotlight? If it is on you, you are not selling!
I was sitting in the best burrito place in Budapest one afternoon. At a table near me, I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation in English, My Hungarian is still pretty weak, so the familiar language caught my attention.
In this conversation, an older guy in a business suit was sitting with a young, fresh faced 20-something guy in jeans and a t-shirt. The older guy was peppering with younger one with questions:
- So how long have you known her?
- Where did you guys meet?
- Do you speak any Slovakian?
- What is your current status?
- What does she do for a living?
- Etc.
The kid didn’t seem to mind, but it was eminently clear that the older guy was COMPLETELY controlling the conversation. I am not making any value judgement here, just an observation.
It reminded me of a talk show. Where Johnny or Jay or Connan or Larry fires off well informed questions, directing the celebrity of the moment through the interview until the key moment when the hot issue is approached, exposed and explored – with or without the consent and/or comfort of the interviewee .
What does this have to do with sales and selling? The key concept here is all about what we can call “the spotlight”.
Some non-salespeople (and some salespeople) have the misguided idea that salespeople love the spotlight. They believe that selling is an opportunity to get up on a kind of stage and present the wonders of a product or service in such a dazzling way that prospective customers can’t help but throw money at them, like bras at a Beatles concert in days of old.
These people have it all wrong. If these people are salespeople, then it is probably a hard job for them. The image of the snake oil salesman on his wagon in the old west town is an old story, and it no longer plays in Peoria or anywhere else.
If you aspire to be an effective professional salesperson, then you should remember the concept of “the spotlight”. To help you remember it, perhaps I should tell you what it is:
When you are in a sales conversation, imagine that you and your prospect are on a stage with two chairs. You sit in one, the prospect in the other. The stage is dark, except for a single spotlight. The spotlight shines not on the person talking, but on the person who is the subject of the conversation.
You are selling most effectively when the spotlight is on the other person – the prospect.
How can this be? Don’t you need to tell the prospect all about your great stuff so that they know that they need to buy it? Not necessarily.
In the sales process that I map out in blow-by-blow detail in my book Mastering Your Sales Process, the first four steps (leads, prospecting, qualifying and needs analysis) are designed to allow the salesperson to demonstrate professionalism which generates trust and to gather client information interactively, in such a way that what feels to the client like the gathering of information (spotlight on them) simultaneously and proactively addresses potential objections and informs parameters for the solution option.
In this way, the second half of the sales process (solution, objections and close) can be brief, spot-on, and totally effective without the need for presentations, lengthy proposals, extended negotiation sessions, or any of those other “spotlight on the salespeople” activities that usually do more damage to the opportunity to close than they do help it.
Proposals and presentations have their place, but if you want to be effective, the skills you need to focus on revolve around understanding the compelling reasons that the prospect has for wanting your product or service, and fleshing them out in a dialogue that highlights your understanding of the issue, your ability to fix it, and your character as the kind of person the prospect wants to partner with towards a solution.
Keeping the spotlight on the prospect with great questions, trial solutions, thorough needs analysis, properly timed and complete proposals will help. A lot. When you do it all right, your closing technique can be as simple as something like “well OK then”. It is true that to close, you do need to say or do something, By keeping the spotlight on the prospect the right way as you work towards the close, you can keep it short, and help make it more effective than your best uninformed, spotlight-on-you monologue or power point presentation ever will.
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Jan/104
How the competition can make you hurt yourself
I was recently involved in a negotiation on behalf of the holder of intellectual property and a small (relative to industry average) potential contract manufacturing partner.
After only a very short set of preliminary meetings, the contract manufacturer sent us an unsolicited, highly detailed proposal for a partnership. This was the smallest mistake they made, and it was no small mistake. As a note on this point alone, a professional salesperson (or negotiator) should certainly work to learn as much as possible about the needs of all parties and the feasibility of various solutions before formally proposing a solution.
But it got worse.
During the course of the preliminary meetings, our side made it clear that we would require the sourcing of a highly complicated, capital intensive and critical component of our product from a well-known and well-respected component manufacturer. The component manufacturer that we specified was considered one of the best in the world, and was used (with positive results) by almost every major manufacturer in our field.
In the proposal from our prospective contract manufacturing partner, it was suggested that this industry leading, highly acclaimed component manufacturer was grossly overcharging us, and that the small contract manufacturer should also produce the (very complicated, very expensive) machines that make the specialized component – an extremely ambitions suggestion. They further suggested that they could make the machines for less than half the cost of the world famous component manufacturer, with twice the capacity, and in less time.
It sounded too good to be true, and that is just how we interpreted it. This unrealistically ambitious suggestion came at a time when we had just begun exploring our relationship, and well before we had explored many of the much more basic issues related to our potential partnership.
This did not bode well for our perceptions of this prospective contract manufacturing partner!
As a general proposition, it is important to show prospective partners that we are competent and capable potential business partners for them. However, making unrealistic claims early in the process is not the way to do it. Especially if this happens before needs are fully understood, and true capabilities are established. The situation is made even worse if these claims are packaged in the context of an obvious attempt to undermine an existing relationship, and even worse than that when attacking the existing relationship is not necessary. In all of these cases, it just appears desperate (and probably is).
This kind of poor execution usually just winds up hurting the efforts of the needless aggressor. Attacking the competition rather than working to learn what problems exist that can be solved together is not the correct behavior of a professional salesperson, and certainly not the most productive.
A small child may be able to brag to his friends that his fathers new car can go 1000 miles per hour, but when you make a similar gesture to your prospective client in hopes of having them reconsider a more realistic offer from one of your competitors, you are hurting yourself far more than you are helping your efforts to secure the business.
Jan/107
Does Social Media Marketing Work?
In my blog post last week I wrote about questions. I’d like to continue that theme, but from a slightly different angle.
In the last year or so, I have seen a similar question come up again and again in the Question and Answer forum on LinkedIn: Do social media venues such as LinkedIn / Twitter/ Facebook, etc. work as vehicles for generating business.
The majority of the answers provided in the forum, like those in most debates, fell onto one side or the other – yes it does, or no it doesn’t. With respect to this specific question, I had a revelation while watching a Disney movie with my kids over the holidays. The revelation was that the factor that makes social media work or not for a business is the same thing that makes the Disney machine work: Great content.
The idea came to me since we had just come back from a Disney on Ice show that introduced the kids to Ariel of The Little Mermaid (and to Disney Popcorn – profit center number 2 for Disney). We went home and later rented the movie (number 3). In the middle of the movie the kids asked when we could go back to Disneyland (number 4).
Disney is a great example of an effective integrated marketing company. Exposure to one kind of product leads naturally to interest in another.
Social media is best thought of the same way. It is infrastructure. Asking if Social Media works is like asking if plumbing works to deliver fresh water. This is really two questions. The first question is “does the plumbing work”. The second question is “will the water that comes through the plumbing be fresh”. Very simply put, the water will be fresh if it is fresh, the pipes are clean, and the pipes do their job and deliver it.
If you have content that resonates with your audience, and you can connect to that audience through the infrastructure of social media, then social media may help you reach your business goals. If you content is not interesting to the audience, then no infrastructure – social media or otherwise – will help.
As sales and marketing professionals, it behooves us to stop evaluating the potential effectiveness of tools and communication vehicles with binary questions based on someone else’s opinions. If we know our business, and know our audience, then we can use the tools that present themselves to us to reach them. From there, we need to connect via great content. If we fail to do so, then social media will work to help your prospects leave your content just as fast as they came.
So does Social Media work? Sure it does. Will it work for you? Depends what you put into the pipes, who you ask to turn them on and how you do it.
Jan/105
Asking the right questions
I love my iPhone. Since it is a mobile device, I use it out of the house and office a lot. Hardly a week goes by without someone seeing me use it and asking me the wrong question:
“Is that a good phone?”
Why is this the wrong question? Good is a matter of perspective. The iPhone is a great phone. For me. It may or may not be good for the person asking the question, and the question they asked won’t help them to figure that out.
I like the iPhone because I rarely use the phone, but often need a wireless modem, e-mail checking on-the-fly, navigation to find a new office while not driving (I use public transportation a lot), and I like that I can also use it in place of my iPod – one less thing to carry!
I have been told that many “power phone” users don’t like the iPhone. It is not well suited for them.
So how is all of this relevant subject matter for a sales blog? It gets back to the question people ask me when they see me using my iPhone:
“Is that a good phone?”
Weak salespeople love questions like that (for example, “is that thing you are selling good?”). It allows them to respond by showering the asker of the question with all of the reasons that the product (or service) in question is indeed good. It typically leads to a conversation in which information is pushed in one direction or the other rather than shared and collaborated on.
The better question for sales people to ask is, “What is it about that item that you like?”, or, “how well does that item meet your needs?”. When asked the “bad” question (is that good), then a better response from the sales person should be some variation on the theme of “well, it depends what you are looking for, or what problem you are trying to solve”.
These questions allows the salesperson to learn what is important to the prospect, which in turn sets up a more effective sales conversation. It invites the prospect to speak, and to define their needs. These are good sales questions. It is more than just a matter of being open-ended, which is important, it is about evoking the things that are important to the prospect about the product or service in question.
People (other than many engineers I know) don’t want to buy things because you bombard them with a bunch of features. People buy benefits. Asking your questions with this in mind will help lead you to the place where you can discuss benefits, specifically the benefits of your solution that are most important to your prospect. This is kind of conversation you want to have if making a sale, or any kind of informed decision is your goal.
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